“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”

“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”

Through the water’s gurgle comes a prisoner’s cry, followed by guards’ admonitions. In a nearby stall he sees Ramin, his nose bleeding, being stripped by two guards and shoved under the water. The boy’s arms form parentheses on his emaciated torso, his hands cupping his genitals, shielding them from view. The water gathering under his feet and swirling into the drain is pink. “That’ll teach you!” one of the guards says. “When we say wake up, we mean wake up. This is not the Plaza, you son of a dog.”

What jars him out of sleep is not the sound of the bullet itself, but the thump of the body falling to the ground a second later. Afterward there is always silence. He wonders what they do with the bodies. Most likely they leave them on the ground and pick them up the next morning, like dishes left over after a dinner party.

The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.

We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.

The woman couldn’t say when they were likely to arrive. Two days, three days, perhaps more. Everything depended upon the search and rescue—and if any of the 242 passengers could indeed be found—and whether their surviving family members actually wanted to make the trip to Trachis. Of course, she said, the airline would fully compensate the inn. Most people probably wouldn’t come, she speculated. But the island was the nearest landfall to the crash, and some no doubt would want to travel there—“for closure,” she added.

During World War II high-flying pilots over the Atlantic often puzzled over phantom specks that showed up on their radar screens. “Radar angels,” they dubbed them and wondered at the faint apparitions, only to learn years later that they were actually birds migrating over open water. Birds, like humans, are mostly moisture—they’re ninety percent water—and a flock of finches on a radar screen shows up like a small weather system: one or two green dots. On a night of heavy migration in autumn or spring, a radar screen blossoms with fleeting spectral dots.

When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.

“I want you to tell me about the cocaine,” said Michelet.

“Of course, m’sieu le chef. Which cocaine, please?”

Michelet’s teeth did a slow, decalcifying grind. For all his power he looked whipped sitting there in his truck, like a man in serious trouble with his wife. “We heard that a load of contraband was dropped at Cayes Caiman last week. On Thursday. And you were seen there on Thursday.”

“Yeah? Hmmm, I don’t know, m’sieu le chef. Cayes Caiman, yeah, sure, I go there sometimes, it’s a good place for sirik and chadwon. But you know I’m not so good with days. Thursday, you said?”

The effect on audiences was astonishing. From the first reported performance, in October 1831, there were accounts of seizures, faintings, and fits of epilepsy among the spectators; though some accused Visser of paying actors to mimic and encourage such convulsions, the phenomenon appears to have been accepted as genuine. Mass motor hysteria would most likely be the diagnosis today, though a physician from Gossl who witnessed one performance proposed theories having to do with electrical contagion; others linked the Fantasy to the Sistine Chapel Syndrome, the hysterics to which certain foreign women—English spinsters, chiefly—sometimes fall prey while viewing the artistic treasures of Italy.

“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”

“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”

“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”

I unbuttoned her blouse halfway up, rubbed coconut oil on her stomach, forehead, and chin. Then Papa Felix, my grandfather, stepped forward. He rolled up his sleeves, pulled his thinning hair into a ponytail. He put his palms on Mrs. Delgado’s belly and began to massage it, gently at first with his fingertips, then hard and deep with his fists. I closed my eyes, chanting Hail Marys over and over, faster and faster, and when I looked up again Papa Felix’s hands were half gone, knuckle-deep in Mrs. Delgado’s body. Blood seeped out from between Papa Felix’s fingers, and one by one he extracted coin-size fleshy blobs and dumped them into the trash can by his feet.

“Negativities,” he said.

He dimmed the lights and drew the curtains as though someone might be watching from afar, then sat down to reveal his plan: the next day, just before the Beatles boarded their plane, Uncle Willie would divert the Beatles’ security guards and send the group to their gate, where we would be waiting, disguised as airport personnel, ready to attack. “I don’t wish to maim them seriously,” he said, “but we must teach them a lesson.” He mapped out the scene on the table with his finger, drawing invisible X’s and arrows, showing who would stand where and who would do what when it was time to strike. But where he saw battle plans I saw fingerprints streaked over a glass tabletop.

“And that,” he said, “is how we will defeat the Beatles.”

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

Justin watches him in silence. There is something in his son’s face. A tightening of his jaw and a flaring of his nostrils that foretells what will come. He isn’t going to ask permission. He is going to shoot. It makes him seem faraway and unfamiliar. He is so enchanted by the desire to kill—the same acute and forceful feeling that drove primitive man to bring a blade of obsidian to a stick and sharpen it—that his current life, his school and his bicycle and his bedroom with the desk scored from the snarl of his pencil and the giant beer mug filled with brown pennies and the movie-monster posters hanging on the wall, has become nothing but a tiny black fly he brushes aside with his hand before bringing it to the stock and tightening his finger around the trigger.

Justin waits for him to say something more and soon he does, when walking about the campsite, kicking through its remains. “Bears don’t unscrew a jar of peanut butter. They don’t unpeel a stick of jerky. Bears don’t drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon and neither do I.” He peers around the cooler and knocks closed its lid. “And bears don’t steal whiskey.”

“He has something of mine,” the man said.

With that, she turned to look at him. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. “Sergio called me to come pick him up, not you.”

“You don’t know me?” His voice pitched higher, edging toward frustration, maybe anger. “You don’t know who I am?”

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t.”

“He’s got my heart,” the man said, melodramatically holding his hands across his chest, but he sneered a bit when he said it. “He’s got a lot of things I want back.”

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

I’m lucky: I spent only a year in jail in Avenal, for forgery, paychecks I faked a long time ago. The police were searching for something to charge me with when I got caught in Las Vegas, and all they came up with were those bad checks. I was in Las Vegas, heading east, as far away as I could get from the gas station that I helped rob with this guy I used to know, Kyle, the only white boy on Gold Street. To this day, I don’t know what happened to Kyle.

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

After she counted the money, the woman folded up the bills and reached deep into the black T-shirt to hide the bills in her bra, and then she walked back out to the car. “You rub that crema on you every night, you hear me?” she ordered, and put her hands on Emilio again, as if to feel once more whatever she might have felt before. “Someone put the evil eye on you,” she told him as her hands traveled up the back of his neck and into the fringes of hair on the back of his head, rubbing him as a lover might, looking away from him in concentration, eyes closed. “You have to believe in it for it to go away.”

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.

She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields.

Four children and thirty years of frontier living, hauling buckets of water, riding on muleback, nights outdoors, and long windy days had robbed her of her beauty. Her hair had turned a steel gray, and for convenience she now cut it herself with her old shears, barely even bothering with a mirror just so long as it was out of here eyes and off her neck – this, the woman who in her youth had ordered by mail from Chicago a book entitled One Hundred Hair Arrangements for the Modern Lady.